Broadband providers and Internet phone companies will have to pick up the tab for the cost of building in mandatory wiretap access for police surveillance, federal regulators ruled Wednesday.

First I’d like to say please read the article because this is a very important issue…The FCC has decided to tax companies, municipalities and universities, all while saying it’s necessary to fight the war on terrorism and to keep cost low (for the FCC and not the companies, municipalities and universities)…from there I’ll say that the simple cost that the FCC is asking these organizations to take on is only going to trickle down to US the consumers…estimation of $7 billion for 1,800 colleges alone seems silly to simply ‘wire tap VoIP and broadband’ for the single use of broadband phone communications…never mind the simple idea that their going to tap everything but just look at VoIP data and not regular web surfing activity. This all stems from an order from the FCC to all Internet broadband and VoIP service providers stating that “This Order is the first critical step to apply” Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act “CALEA obligations to new technologies and services that are increasingly relied upon by the American public to meet their communications needs.” The universities and VoIP providers have filed a suit against the FCC in regards to this…and while that suit is still pending they’ve decided to add on this tax issue…Now when the CALEA law was still just a bill, congress was assured that this law was intended ONLY for telecommunications and not for things like Prodigy, AOL, etc. Yet the FCC now feels that due to VoIP, broadband is now part of telecommunication. But even without the CALEA law, police agencies can legally wiretap Internet communications…hence the FBI’s Carnivore system…already in place to handle these things. Of course the FBI and the FCC are touting around claiming this is needed to help stop terrorist and aid in Home Land Security…of course this all goes hand in hand with my previous posting about Congress considering mandatory ISP snooping…and those of you who read a previous article about the Homeland Security’s handling of white powder in envelopes, already know Homeland wouldn’t have a clue as to what to do with VoIP wiretaps…at the end of the day this technology will probably be used illegally by the government in a quest to do something good, they’ll then find out what they want to know, and have to find some other means to prove what they know to be true…OR in a more likely move they’ll attempt to go to trial with the data they have obtained through illegal measures given to them by this new FCC order intended for other purposes…and find themselves with a clearly guilty man walking free…Welcome To CrzyLand-Nic